They learn a lot differently than the lecture-format of traditional schooling.

People learn from doing, from reflecting on what just happened, by investigating root causes in discussion with others, by talking and thinking together.

The “Learning Heads” illustrate how much more information people retain when they engage more of their senses in the process. My theory is that adding passionate commitment ratchets the learning up several notches.

Can genuine democracy exist when the economy is enormously unequal, if the gap between the richest and poorest people in the country gets larger every day? Can genuine democracy exist if decisions about how the land is used and how our cities develop are made by a handful of powerful people?

Of course not. Popular education is in the service of the movements that work for change. Movements that work to make the economy less unequal and more democratic. Movements that work to broaden the field of who gets to make informed decisions about the land and our cities. Movements that model the change we want to see.

Those movements build learning to build change in a spiral of collective experience, discovery, strategy, action, and reflection: